Petty Officer 3rd Class Roisin Gabrielle Reynard-

  The heat of his hand seemed to have branded itself onto my skin, a phantom pressure that was more real than the cool, recycled air of the maintenance bay. I was mortified. Not just by the public display, but by my own traitorous reaction. When Chief Warrant Officer Wasserman had grabbed me, his grip a vise of desperation and pain, my first instinct hadn’t been to pull away. It had been to melt.

  Even through the sterile scent of antiseptic and the ozone-tang of active magitech, his own scent—a mix of old leather, weapons-grade lubricant, and the unique, spicy musk of his Physical-affinity aura—had flooded my senses. Surrounded by the XO and the medical team, my body had screamed a singular, humiliating command: sink back. Let the solid wall of his chest bear your weight. Let his large, scarred hand claim what little there was of you. Close your eyes and let him do whatever he wanted.

  A shiver that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature ran down my spine. No! The mental shout was a splash of cold water, a mantra I had to reinforce daily. I was not going to get bonded. Not yet. I was not some creature of pure instinct, driven by base desires… or at least, I hadn’t been until my chrysalis turned my biology into a minefield. The most terrifying part? The necrotic essence crawling through his pathways like spiritual rot hadn’t even been a deterrent. If anything, it was a perverse attraction. My spiritual affinity was literally made to chew through that kind of corrosive, negative energy.

  Not that I could manipulate it like a true necromancer, weaving it into spells of decay and command. And I certainly couldn’t purify it on contact like a life mage, burning it away with holy light. But I understood it. Necrotic essence wasn’t inherently evil; it was just entropy, the universe’s slow, inevitable sigh towards cold and stillness. It was a fundamental thread in the never-ending tapestry of essence that made up reality. People just tended to use it for evil purposes because it was devastatingly effective, and if your will wasn't absolute, it had a nasty habit of turning around and puppeteering the puppeteer.

  The second reason for my frustration was the caliban itself.

  And that, more than my hormonal betrayal, made me genuinely angry. I shouldn’t be, I supposed. Ignorance of advanced magitech wasn't a capital crime, even for warrant officers. But the way he’d been using it was so profoundly, catastrophically WRONG. I didn’t understand the full story. He’d mumbled something about costs, a barrier I, a girl who could rebuild a drone’s brain from scrap and prayer, found utterly foreign.

  Even my mother, a spiritual adept of no small skill, could have regenerated his scarred meridians given time. I couldn’t—wrong gifts, my talents lay in assembly and spiritual interface, not cellular regeneration—but any foundation-stage life mage with at least condensed energy could have done it. Scrot, the man had his own potent healing gifts! Why couldn’t he just channel that power to grow new pathways? The scars were old, set, but not irreparable.

  The caliban, as I’d learned from its screaming, failing architecture, was a chi stabilizer. A sophisticated one, silver-tier and probably worth more than the entire township I’d grown up in. Its purpose was elegant: to allow both natural essence—the stuff that powered technology, physical enhancements, and ranged attacks—and magical essence—the raw material of sorcery, spiritualism, necromancy, and other ‘supernormal’ affinities—to achieve a perfect, convertible balance.

  That meant a user could, in a pinch, fake a higher tier. Say you were a Physical-affinity brawler trapped in a low-tech, high-magic rift where your kinetic punches were weakened. The caliban could let your fists tap into a simulated elemental or kinetic-force effect, letting you punch above your weight class by pretending your strength was a form of earth magic. My own cross-discipline sorcery did this by default; it was a standard, if difficult, trick for anyone lucky or stubborn enough to develop affinities in both tech and sorcerous domains. You learned to be fluid, to translate the language of one essence into another.

  Elementalists had it easy. Their affinity was annoyingly versatile. Earth affinity, for instance, was considered as natural as it was supernatural. An earth mage could call a wall of stone in a magic-rich realm or just make the ground real shaky in a tech-heavy one with roughly the same effort. They were the golden children of the rift-delving world.

  That was how a caliban was supposed to work. It threaded its impossibly fine magitech filaments alongside the user’s natural meridians, a delicate symbiote that acted as a universal translator and amplifier for their essence. Incredibly useful if you weren’t a mental gymnast capable of high-tier metaphysical calculus on the fly.

  But Wasserman? He hadn’t been using it to translate. He’d been using it as a bypass. A shoddy, dangerous workaround for a crippled power grid. Instead of using the delicate filaments to alter the quality of his essence, he’d been forcing the full, raging torrent of his power through them, using the caliban’s internal relays as a substitute meridian network. It was like trying to use the tiny capacitor from an electric radio to reroute the main feed of a nuclear reactor. It worked, sort of, right up until the moment it turned into a slag heap.

  And the moment had come when a secondary essence type—necrotic, the absolute antithesis of his primary Life/Divine aura—had entered the mix. His own essence had fought it, the conflict creating a feedback loop of spiritual corruption that his jury-rigged system was never designed to handle. Every damned relay in the caliban had started overloading and bursting like popcorn under a blowtorch.

  Now I knew his affinities, or at least the ones he used regularly. Physical, obviously. You could tell that just by looking at the powerful, scarred topography of his body, a landscape I had an increasingly inappropriate desire to explore. Dammit, focus, Roisin. Physical, a strong Life or Divine affinity (hence the healing and that paladin aura), and something… probabilistic. Luck, fortune, subtle foresight, quantum instability—something that let him dance through blaster fire and wield an energy blade without slicing his own limbs off. He’d been running three potent types of essence through channels meant for delicate calibration, not raw throughput. The system’s catastrophic failure wasn't a surprise; it was an inevitability.

  I would have loved to have been able to fix the caliban itself. A silver-tier magitech implant was a masterpiece. But I couldn’t. My skills were vast, but my personal power was still… tin. Rebuilding it to copper specifications was the best I could manage, and while a copper caliban was a rare and valuable piece of kit, it wasn't the one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable relic the silver had been.

  So instead, I’d cheated. I’d gone around the problem. Essence-circuitry tattoos were a well-known, if niche, field. I’d used millions of micro-fine strands of carbon nanotube, infused with a non-degrading axion-protein slurry that could channel both essence and physical force, and woven them through the ruined artificial networks the caliban’s cables had carved into him.

  It was a brutal, pragmatic solution. I was a little ashamed of the jury-rig, but it worked. It created a new, stable pathway that didn’t force his warring essences to share a single, burnt-out highway. His old Caliban damaged as it was, was his property… I’d left it in his ship storage in hopes that someday I or someone else would be able to fix it for him.

  Physical and necrotic essence were old, familiar adversaries; they could coexist in a channel better than life and necrotic could. At the very least, he no longer required a semi-sentient golem intelligence to play traffic cop for an energy flow it couldn't hope to control. I didn’t know if I could help with the root cause of the necrotic buildup—that would take a true, and probably quite powerful, life mage to combat without risking my own spiritual corruption—but maybe, with his own life essence now unblocked, he could begin to expel it himself. If you cannot defeat a enemy, contain it. Stabilize the battlefield.

  At least until he could find someone who could actually heal the original damage.

  I sighed, the sound loud in the quiet bay. I could still feel the ghost of his arm wrapped around my waist, his hand possessive on my breast, the solid, warm plane of his chest pressed against my back. This was bad. Catastrophically bad. Even if this was just lust—a concept I was only beginning to understand in a visceral way—and not the deep, aura-driven pull towards bonding, it could still lead there. A bond I was not ready for, not with him, not with anyone.

  I also didn’t know if his goals and mine meshed. Obviously, our auras were complimentary; the way my spirit had settled in his presence, like a key finding its lock, was proof enough of that. With just a little training on both our parts, our gifts could reinforce each other amazingly. But I had a mission. A purpose. I couldn’t let it be subsumed by whatever his own crusade was. I still didn’t really know what a ‘divine paladin’ was. Did he serve a specific deity, one with doctrines and laws that might conflict with my own simple faith in the Church? Would his quest demand a loyalty that superseded my vow to hunt slavers?

  I couldn’t take that risk. And then there were the Fleet rules about fraternization. On a standard vessel, a warrant officer and a petty officer third might never interact. But here? On the Crow? He was the head of my department, my direct superior in the operational chain of command.

  There was also the terrifying chasm in our power levels. He was a silver core, second stage, with an established foundation and the beginnings of a true core. I was barely a condensator, my energy still coalescing. Trying to merge our essence flows, a common side effect of deep bonding, would annihilate my barely-formed capabilities like a matchstick in a firestorm.

  The two problems were related, but different, and the sum of them meant I didn’t dare get close enough to even socialize and learn anything about him. Distance was my only defense.

  Over the last several weeks, I’d gradually been introduced to the bizarre, efficient, and slightly mad way the drone pilots worked on The Crow. There were six of us operators in regular rotation: four for drones and two for golems. Then there were the two dwarf techs, Mick and Lacey, who spent as much time maintaining the troopers’ powered armor as they did tending to the twelve drop pods mounted along the ship’s central axis. Twelve pods for six primary operators meant we had redundancy, backups in case of catastrophic losses, but it also highlighted the ship's original design intent. The Crow was clearly meant for a much larger contingent of droners. The living spaces were luxurious, but we still had lots of extra space.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Fortunately, several of us could handle multiple pods in an emergency, but the standard Fleet doctrine was the opposite: two droners for every pod to split duties and provide immediate relief. The whole ship was like that—spacious, almost echoingly so in some sections, but running with a skeleton crew. The catch was that this skeleton crew was almost entirely composed of high-stage cultivators or people with weird, hyper-specialized gifts like mine that gave them the utility of three normal crewmen.

  I, surprisingly, had two ‘assigned’ pods. One was a golem pod for ground assault and rifting, and the other was an internal Fleet pod for void operations. The latter was a quiet, unspoken acknowledgment from the XO or the Captain about what I’d done in the Kobayashi scenario. They knew.

  The golem pod was easy. Blissfully, mind-numbingly easy. Golems were basically giant lumps of articulated metal, ceramic composite, and enchanted stone. No electronics to speak of, just sorcerous senses linked directly to their cores. Maintaining them was less about repairs and more about therapy. It consisted of long hours with a rag and polish, whispering encouragement, and making sure their core-enchantments were stable. It was a slight, constant drag on my own essence reserves to keep them topped up, but it was peaceful.

  I spent my time in the golem pod expanding their potential behavioral routines. You didn’t want to make them truly sentient—that way led to messy philosophical debates and potential rebellion—but with careful expansion, you could dramatically improve their autonomous response by updating nested activity lists. It was like teaching a very smart dog new tricks; it made them more effective and gave their controller more options without having to micromanage every swipe of a claw.

  The tech drones, the sleek, deadly space-born ones, were an entirely different story. There were maintenance drones to handle the physical upkeep, but their tiny, crystal-based brains were nightmares of Fleet-standard code, constantly on the verge of memory leaks, software overflows, and driver conflicts. They were technically always active, sleeping in their cradles, which meant their systems were always degrading. Reloading a software package after a hard shutdown was a multi-hour nightmare of debugging. In my case, with my gift, it was almost faster to just scrap the old programming and rebuild their little brains from the substrate up using my nanite swarm and custom, streamlined software.

  I knew damned well where my strengths lay. Scrap was my goldmine, emergency parts my diamonds and pearls. I’d requested, and to my surprise been granted, a generous supply of cheap, base-level components that were difficult to manufacture on the fly. With my gift, I could rebuild almost the entire pod’s complement of drones from scratch if they were ever wiped out. Chief Braxis had complained, his voice a gravelly rumble, about me creating a pod that only I could use effectively, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it. He was a pragmatist. He knew that if the fit truly hit the shan, I could make a single Fleet pod perform like a full squadron of standardized models, given enough time and scrap.

  The two dwarven controllers, Mick and Lacey, both solid silver-cores, had their own pods, which were fascinating merged drone/golem combinations, a particular dwarven specialty. Only dwarves seemed to have the innate patience and earth-aligned affinity to truly blend high technology with runic magic into a seamless magitech whole.

  They also handled the troopers’ heavy armor and, in their spare time, played traditional blacksmith, repairing the troopers’ low-tech gear—sword edges, armor plates, axe heads—in a dedicated bay with an actual plasma forge and a set of hammers that looked like they could tenderize a battle tank. That part of the ship was heavily sound-dampened, for excellent reason. The rhythmic, deafening CLANG-CLANG-CLANG of rune-work being hammered into hot metal was not conducive to delicate drone programming.

  And if that weren’t enough, I was also on the hook to assist with the engines occasionally. The trapped spirit I’d discovered had departed the moment it was freed, off to whatever afterlife trapped spirits dream of, and the formation mage who had restarted the drive’s core pattern was an artist. I had no talent or training for true, large-scale formation magic—yet—but I could appreciate a master at work. The precision, the flow of power, the intricate layering of symbols… she must have cost the Captain a fortune.

  Faster-than-light travel almost always relied on enchantments or formation magic. Technology and physical laws got really stubborn about little things like the light-speed barrier and special relativity. You had to be ready to cheat, to go around them, if you wanted to travel any method other than lumbering through greater node gates. Supposedly, at tech levels nine and ten, there were non-magical methods of breaking the rules, but those were more mythical than dragons. And I say that knowing there is verified, albeit terrifying, proof of non-void dragons. A tech-10 FTL drive? Heh. Right. You’d have to delve a tech-10 greater hulk successfully to even catch a rumor of one. Good luck finding a hulk like that, let alone surviving the experience long enough to tell the tale.

  I was elbow-deep in polishing the ceramic carapace of my favorite golem, a quadruped model designated ‘Scratcher,’ when Dienne-Lar decided to grace me with his presence. He was… visually distracting, I’d give him that. Petty Officer First Class Dienne-Lar, a high copper sorcerer, was one of the two Charlottes—elves—that ran the other golem pods.

  On the plus side, his aura was like drinking from a cold, clear spring. Refreshing, but ultimately… cold. Sure, he was prettier than any man had a right to be, all sharp angles, flawless skin, and flowing hair, but he was also nearly as petty as Princeton, utterly aware of his physical perfection, and for some reason, as I matured and became even more physically uncoordinated trying to catch up to my body’s rapid changes, he was finding more and more excuses to hover.

  Look, I get it. Compared to the voluptuous standards of the galaxy, Maenads are short, slender, and kind of goofy-looking. Oversized ears, eyes too large for our faces, skin that comes in a palette of primary colors nature never intended… sure, we were originally designed to appeal to desperate men who’d been in the deep rifts too long. But there’s a world of difference between a delver who hasn’t seen a woman in a year and a Charlotte who surrounded himself with curated beauty as a matter of course. Yet, he kept trying to flirt. I really didn’t get it. The ship was full of stunningly beautiful women—human, wolf-kin, even a lovely dwarven lass or two—who would apparently happily fall into a rack with him. Why was he pushing me?

  It would have been tolerable if it were someone like Braxis. His crude, often obscene flirting was just background noise, the Goblin equivalent of a handshake. If I ever actually took him seriously, he’d probably have a seizure and try to get the hell away from me, especially as I now stood a good head taller than him. It was just his way of interacting.

  Dienne-Lar, though, while a lot more subtle and polished in his approach, was obviously, persistently interested in getting to know me a lot better, physically, than I could ever tolerate. I wasn’t about to explain the intricacies of forced bonding to him, but even my vague hints about possibly being more interested in girls had only seemed to make him more intrigued. It was creeping me out, and I was starting to wonder if I needed to have a quiet word with Chief Braxis or, scrot forbid, the XO.

  He was a copper, and I was still tin. If he ever decided to take his interest past the occasional ‘accidental’ brush of his hand and his attempts at verbal seduction, I was confident my swarm could ensure he wouldn’t be courting anyone until he’d spent a small fortune on regeneration treatments. It would probably get me cashiered, but I REALLY didn’t want to risk any situation that could even vaguely lead to a bond with a male who likely needed a dedicated database to keep track of his conquests.

  I focused on Scratcher, who was emitting a low, rhythmic purr as I worked the polish into its composite hide. Golems were weirdly fun. Their cores were always rift-borne, loot dropped by reasonably powerful chaos spawn. Once the spawn was dead, the pure chaotic energy was absorbed by the rift itself and fed out to the delvers as advancement fuel.

  The cores contained the leftover essence, the spiritual blueprint of whatever creature the rift had forced the chaos-spawn to imitate so it could be fought. Golems, when active, remembered on some basic, instinctual level how they were treated, and could even learn from fighting. Their intelligence was around that of a very smart animal, and they retained a few suppressed animal instincts.

  Scratcher clearly came from some kind of rift-born feline. It would butt its head against my hand, and the purring was a deep, throaty vibration I could feel through the polishing cloth. It was about waist-high to me, a quadruped with a grasping, cutting mouth lined with essence-enhanced depleted uranium teeth, and claws that could shred enhanced polycarbonate like tissue paper. Its purr suddenly shifted into a low, warning growl as it sensed my discomfort with the approaching elf.

  It wasn’t that Dienne-Lar was a bad guy. By all accounts, he wasn’t. He had courage in spades. Pulling from the crew’s shared history logs, he was known for plunging right into the thick of the fight during rift assaults, a place most Charlottes, who preferred long-range spell-slinging, wouldn’t dare go. His devotion to smashing the Chaos Lords was unquestioned, just like nearly everyone else on this ship of misfits and zealots. He had proven his loyalty and valor in the furnace of real combat, time and again.

  But… I think I just bugged him. I was always there, a member of his team. He wasn’t my superior, so there was no chain-of-command barrier, but I was that one girl who remained utterly un-charmed. He was clearly the type to polish his medals every night, a man deeply aware of his own image, and I think my stubborn refusal to even blush at his advances was a blow to his pride. A challenge he couldn’t ignore.

  “Hello, Gabrielle,” he said, his voice a smooth melody as he leaned against the composite white bulkhead of the maintenance bay. He struck a casual pose, meant to look effortless but undoubtedly practiced.

  Again, it was irritating. I actually loved my middle name; I thought it was far prettier than ‘Roisin’ or even ‘Rose.’ If it had been a certain battle-scarred warrant officer using it, I’d probably have melted into a puddle and purred louder than Scratcher. I would even have welcomed Commander Taera using it—despite her gruffness and her constant, exhausting need to ‘win’ every social interaction, I’d grown surprisingly comfortable with her presence, especially after she helped me stabilize Dav—Chief Warrant Officer Wasserman. But coming from Dienne-Lar, my contemporary and sometimes rival, it felt… proprietary.

  “Greetings, Petty Officer First Class Dienne-Lar,” I replied, my tone flat and professional. I didn’t look up from Scratcher’s flank. “I am kind of busy with golem familiarization, but do you need something?”

  He smiled, a secret, knowing smile that had probably liquefied knees from here to the Core Worlds. Princeton would have been a puddle on the deck, trying to drag him off to a storage locker, legalities be damned. Elves were gene-modded for beauty, based on the original Dryad template, and when you combined that with the honed physique of a physical-affinity cultivator, it was a potent package. “Of course there is. I could think of a number of things I need, but alas, you are attracted to the fairer sex. I am helplessly enthralled by a woman who cannot even see me.”

  I finally stopped polishing and fixed him with a flat glare. “Ensign Williams can see you just fine, as can PFC Lucas. And that lovely Amazon guard you used almost the exact same line on last week, Sergeant Corellia, seemed to see you quite clearly.” He was fishing for a denial, a protest that I did see him, but I wasn’t in the mood. I hadn’t seen David since the procedure, except for the occasional stiff salute in the passageway and during PT, where he and the troopers, like me, preferred to punish themselves in the heavy-gravity gym.

  He’d sent a carefully-worded, formal, and rather cool letter of appreciation—an actual hardcopy on real paper, not a blitmail—as well as a formal commendation recommendation for ‘service above and beyond.’ I appreciated the gesture, it would look good in my file, but the reality was a chasm.

  Warrant officers were a weird hybrid, but they were considered part of the commissioned world. They didn’t mix with us enlisted peons socially. Outside of combined ops, joint training exercises, or a rift drop, the only chance I’d have to see him was if I became a behavior problem and he had to discipline me. That was not the interaction I wanted. At least… not an interaction I wanted yet.

  I wanted to get to know him. To find out if an eventual, careful friendship could develop. To learn his goals, his hopes, what drove him. To see if he would even understand, let alone value, mine.